I think, to some degree, people are taking both the comics and District 9 too literally. An allegory can’t and shouldn’t be completely literal. For example, one point of District 9 is that most people see the aliens in a certain way, as lesser beings driven by animal instinct or impulse and lacking intelligence, just like many whites in South Africa saw blacks as similarly different or alien even though they actually weren’t.
To say an allegory doesn’t work because it has some differences from reality is like complaining a metaphor isn’t literal. “Oh, all the world isn’t literally a stage so that metaphor doesn’t work.”
An allegory is essentially a way to introduce a thought to you sideways to slip by your biases which make you unwilling to consider a subject in a certain light. People may not be able to come to terms with fact/philosophy/realization X because their biases won’t allow it to be questioned. But if you have an allegory teach you Lesson Y, which is different enough that it doesn’t activate your biases, and then once that understanding is implanted, it might end up skipping past your mental/bias defenses and make you come to a realization that Lesson Y also applies to realization X.
But Lesson Y has to be an analogous situation to realization X, otherwise there’s no reason to apply Lesson Y to change your mind about realization X, and, if done poorly, may actually reinforce your biases about realization X.
If I come away from a movie saying “wait, the bad guy is right here, mutants ARE dangerous and we should keep tabs on them - why does the movie even consider him a bad guy? His point seems pretty reasonable” then obviously you’re never going to come to the realization of “bigots are wrong, I shouldn’t treat other races/homosexuals badly”
I basically come away from every X-Men movie thinking “yep, the villain in this movie who wants to register/control/keep us safe from mutants should be the hero of this story”, it’s counterproductive for an allegory to make me feel like mutants are an oppressed minority that are treated unfairly.
Note: I haven’t seen all the x-men movies. Maybe one of them has a villain that zealously wants to inflict genocide. The ones I saw only involved people wanting to be able to register/track/safely contain/be able to secure against dangerous mutants.
An unfortunate thing is that the movie makes explicit that most of the aliens ARE rather mindless and lacking intelligence. “Christopher” is the only alien(and possibly “his” “son”) shown with a human level of intelligence, I’ve seen theories he is the queen alien the humans theorized controlled the prawn colony, that he hid among the drones to avoid being experimented on.
I can only think of one human villain in the movie franchise who didn’t explicitly want to wipe out mutants - Senator Kelly, from the first movie. The second film featured Colonel Stryker, who tried to annihilate every mutant in the world with a modified Cerebro. The third movie was mostly about Magneto, but the government there was developing a “cure” for mutants that would also wipe them out as a distinct species. It wouldn’t actually kill them, but it would erase them as a distinct population group, and they don’t appear to be too concerned with asking consent before applying the drug. In the Wolverine origins movie, the human villain was Stryker again, who hadn’t worked his way up to genocide yet, (it takes place before X-Men 2) but was keeping mutants in cages and doing radical experimental surgery on them. Same with the human villain in the second Wolverine movie, although his efforts were mostly Wolverine-centric. I guess that’s actually two non-genocidal human villains in the films, but this guy was more than willing to cut Wolverine into little pieces so he could steal his healing factor - not genocidal, but really not a good guy. I don’t recall a major human villain in First Class, but in the sequel to that one, Peter Dinklage is vivisecting mutants so he can build his anti-mutant robots - which eventually drive the entire species to the brink of extinction, and take a good chunk of the non-mutant world with them.
In the comics, there are a few more “reasonable” people who are concerned about the mutant problem, but the ones who aren’t secretly hiding a genocidal agenda tend to be unwittingly working for someone with one. Which is the main reason why mutants always oppose any sort of registration scheme, no matter how well intentioned it appears on the surface - there’s always someone out there who’s ready and willing to pervert such a program to monstrous ends.
That’s what I was thinking. It is fun to have discussions about what things in movies would mean in real life, and what the natural consequences would be, but for the sake of enjoyment you shouldn’t overthink the metaphor.
There won’t be a one to one correlation. You could make a movie where people with purple hair is the allegory for homosexuality, and purple hair people have to decide if they want to be open or hide or wear wigs, but that wouldn’t be as exciting as a movie with telepathic mutants.
And while Senator Kelly didn’t want to wipe out the mutants, he did want to have the Mutant Registration Act and to ban mutant kids from school. I can’t think of anything in real life analogous to the Registration Act, but there have been people over the years who want to keep gay kids and teachers out of schools because they are too dangerous to the normal kids.
Yeah, the point is that those people are wrong about gay people being dangerous to children while the people from the movies are RIGHT about mutants being dangerous to children and everyone else.
I don’t think that was necessarily true. Were they depicted that way because the movie was from the human point of view? Or because they were put in a position through their segregation where they had no way to be members of society? Or because they were sick and malnourished on the ship? Or because it simply made a better movie? All of the above?
Looking at people less empathetically, not many of us have “human” levels of intelligence if that means possessing the ability to repair a space ship using jury-rigged equipment, understanding foreign/unfamiliar concepts of law and property, and other things that Christopher did.
I guess it depends on your definition of being dangerous. If you mean that capable of bringing harm to someone else, either on purpose or accident, then every teenager ever, whether straight, gay, or mutant is dangerous.
But like I said before, movies can be overanalyzed, either for fun or just to be nitpicky. You can break down each part of the metaphor and list all the things that don’t line up to real life. Or it’s also possible to go somewhat in the opposite direction and go full Room 237 and read into a movie all sorts of things that aren’t there. The allegories in the X-Men movies and District 9 work for me, and bring extra meaning to the stories, but there’s nothing wrong if they don’t for you.
People have said that about black people, Jews, and homosexuals over and over, throughout history. They’re saying that about Muslims RIGHT NOW. That they’re going to destroy civilization/the world, often through violence, usually through radical change that tears at the space-time continuum.
Is this some sort of meta parody post that’s whooshing past me?
See above. All this manifests in the creation of identity and societal change, from freeing slaves to Harlem to gay marriage.
People said and believed these things in all seriousness. Look at the debate surrounding the passage of the 14th amendment in the 1860s. We don’t need mutants to destroy us all, the gypsies will do that first. Mutants may be exaggerated symbolism, but not different.
It has been a while since you’ve seen that movie, none of those things are true.
As a homosexual, I’ve taken a lot of comfort in some aspects of the X-Men movies–they present political views that affect ME, and possible scenarios and fixes that affect ME. Such as the possibility of a cure or other medical/genetic manipulation, screening, being ostracized by the government and society, being ghettoized, etc. So heartening to see it all reduced to “We must stop evil mutants!” in this thread.
Is there not one mutant out there that represents your own fears and accomplishments and failures and dreams?
Been done. Don’t remember the issue number, but during Simonson’s all too short run of FF, there were “Mutant Registration Hearings” and Ben point blank said something like “I never thought I’d be on the same side as the NRA and the ACLU”.
I think what definitely ruined any hope for peaceful coexistence was X2. In that film you have one mutant who can kill every single person in the world. The fact that he was under mind control is irrelevant. How many people died that day? Yeah, he was stopped before everyone died, but there had to have been pilots on final descent, or surgeons operating, people driving, etc. I would not be surprised that there are millions dead. By one mutant.
I understand Magneto’s viewpoint. He’s right. There’s no comprise. It’s one side or the other. Where I stand, were I in that universe, depends solely on if I had powers or not.
This kind of negates the comparison to gun control even, hell even if everyone could legally own nukes it wouldn’t mean potentially the death of all humanity if one person gets horribly depressed.
This was addressed directly exactly one time–during Morrison’s run of the X-Men (which was right before, and probably the cause for–the whole “No More Mutants!” crap). Per Morrison, people were freaking out over mutants for two reasons.:
The mutant “subculture” (see “Blacks and Black Culture” or “Gays and Gay Culture” rants* was becoming extremely popular with da yooth of America and that was a sore-spot. It’s like your kid who you want to be become a shitkicker-redneck like you dressing up and dancing to Donna Summers songs in the mid’70s. Also, there was a drug called “MGH” (Mutant Growth Hormone) that if mixed with a small cell-scraping of a mutant would give you their powers for a short amount of time (and possibly permanately fuck up your genetics. So now your no-longer redneck son is dancing to Donna Summers music and dressing like the Village People. While growing wings out his back.* The horror)
Morrison set an actual deadline: either 1 or 2 generations (20 or 40 years) mutants will become a majority and OMG! they might extinct us.
Both of which are…storywise…coherent reasons for mutants to freak people out in a way that the FF and radioactive spiders don’t.
*I couldn’t figure out how to extent the redneck->gay analogy to MGH.
There’s obviously a difference in degree, but some people would argue that other races/cultures/sexualities do “destroy” our culture, albeit in a slow, insidious way of changing our language or destroying our moral values (instead of shooting laser beams or blowing stuff up).
And, to be fair, the comics have dealt with the issue of mutants being de facto dangerous… well, it was actually the Marvel universe at large, but the Civil War storyline in 2006 was about whether superheroes should be forced to register and fall under government bureaucracy as opposed to operating as vigilantes. (The X-Men basically sat out the whole thing, saying, ‘we-re anti-reg and we’ve always been, don’t try to fuck with us’).
Yeah, but how many people know that a mutant caused all that? All they know is that everyone went all hurty for a while, and then it stopped. The X-Men dropped a thick packet on info on the President’s desk at the end, but we don’t know how much of the truth they laid out in that, versus just pinning the whole thing on Stryker’s mutant genocide machine having an unspecified malfunction.
I tend to agree that at the time of their origin in the 1960s, X-Men’s allegorical take was more along racial/sociopolitical themes – Magneto and the Brotherhood being the hardcore militant/revolutionary types(*) feel they were driven into becoming criminal subversives.
(*Ya think Magneto may have been a big JDL supporter?)
However with the passing of time and the evolution of society itself, the allegory of the Outsider can itself evolve and adapt. So the X-men of the current generation are more about *all *the types of “different” person who is ostracised because of that, and what does it mean to deserve “normal” treatment.
But there comes about another aspect: in those intervening decades, society itself has grown more concerned about unknown or ill-defined risks brought about by the very changes around them. GMO foods, climate change, EMFs, privacy and surveillance issues, big Pharma, covert operations, side effects of fracking… people are far more worried about unintended consequences and externalities now, so it is sensible to ask “Well, who’s in charge of preventing this from going wrong? And how do I know I can trust that?”.
However this can be tied in with the overall X-Men ethos in the sense that in-universe it speaks to society’s known problem with risk assesment. There are probably a majority of mutants whose changes are essentally innocuous, just quirky, maybe even not so “super”, and some perhaps actually a disability not much different from a regular-human congenital disorder; but who get screwed over just because all everyone can think of, and virtually all that we ever read or hear about, is the one who can obliterate the city if s/he suffers a minor seizure or the schmuck in the dork helmet who goes around claiming he’s gonna cure the world of humans; so they treat every one of them as an existential threat.